Counting Cats

Let’s turn now to animal behaviorist John Bradshaw, who will give this post some substance:

We know they dream because you can measure the brain waves and the movements of the animal (unintelligible) which are very similar to the sorts of things that go on in humans when we dream… So what we don’t know is whether they remember their dreams when they wake up, and we tend to remember the last dream we had in the night when we wake up. We don’t know whether a dog or a cat will do that or whether it is purely a, you know, a mechanical refreshing of the brain that goes on and the animal is never aware of it in the way that we are aware of some of the things we dream about. But it does point to the possibility that dogs and cats are capable of some sort of limited thoughts about the past. They’re not simply little robots programmed by training to do particular things, that they have minds of their own. I mean they can count, for example. They can count small numbers. Both species can count. So if they can do that, you know, they have a level of cognitive complexity which is not totally robotic at all.